Antoni Fałat

Antoni Fałat (1942, Warsaw - 2024) was a painter, graphic artist and draughtsman, as well as the founder and long-time rector of the European Academy of Arts in Warsaw. He completed his studies at the Faculty of Painting of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, defending in 1969 his diploma with distinction in the studio of Professor Aleksander Kobzdej.

He was one of the most outstanding painters making their debut at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1969 he co-created the „AUT” group (Aut Pictura Aut Nihil), whose programme - announced at an exhibition at the MDM Gallery in Warsaw in 1970 - was contained in the slogan „Polish figuration, Polish style, Polish exoticism”. He also took part in the „For Improvement” movement, gathering graduates of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, and in the 1980s in the activities of the independent culture.

He worked out an original variety of photorealism, close to the expressionist current of the new figuration. As models for his pictures he took old, 19th-century photographs from family albums, creating on their basis new, atmospheric and contrasting images of people with characteristic, pale, as if „dead”, anonymous physiognomies. He limited the colouring to a „photographic” range of black, white and grey, sometimes enriched with a strong accent of green or ultramarine; broad planes, synthetic modelling with chiaroscuro and a drawing on the border of realism and deformation define the recognisable character of this painting.

The essence of his art, however, was not the human being itself. The figure, dressed in a costume from another era, took on meaning only in an encounter with others - in juxtaposition with attributes, gesture, pose and the title of the picture. The subject became human relationships, the place of the individual in the community and the attitude towards tradition and conventions, and the whole was at times a bitter commentary on the conventionality of behaviour and the omnipresent drive to unify the human being. Fałat developed these threads in cycles connected with Polish reality, including „Polish Portraits” and „The Poland of the Pharaohs”.

In 1992 he founded the private European Academy of Arts in Warsaw, of which he became rector, and in 1992-1996 he sat on the Council of Culture to the President of the Republic of Poland. His works were shown at several dozen exhibitions in Poland and abroad - including at the UN headquarters in Geneva (2005) and the European Parliament in Brussels (2015) - and are in the collections of the National Museums in Warsaw, Kraków and Gdańsk, the Zachęta - National Gallery of Art, the Museum in Ghent and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Consistent and distinct, Fałat remains one of the most important representatives of the Polish new figuration.